Here's my screencast of a portion of the Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site tour.
I used Screencast-O-Matic to produce it. I also tried Picasa, but it did not provide voice-over audio as an option, only a musical background. I looked briefly at ScreenToaster, but quickly gave up, as it failed to explain how to frame and capture an image; at least I could not make it work intuitively.
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cQhf2oeEd
This morning I found Adobe Premier Elements already installed on my laptop pc. I had forgotten about it. It has an excellent tutorial. I recommend a closer look if you already use Adobe products. I don't need the suite of products, so I have Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, and have misplaced somewhere Adobe Air for video conferencing.
To use screencasting in a library setting, I think the MNLink tutorials were a good example. A menu of short clips created with Screen-O-Matic might be good enough. Else, you need a dedicated person on staff or contract with someone who has the skills and time. Well-written content is important. Does everyone remember how bad the DBase II User Guide was? That set the standard for me for Bad.
Who owns the content? I did not use any of Lee Radzak's slides. My content is my own, but I have an issue in my own mind to represent the MN Historical Society well. What music background is free in the public domain? I might like "I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper" in the background, but can I share my mp3 in a blog? Probably not.
My Split Rock Tour took several tries over two days. Part of the time was consumed by selecting and adding photos from various Split Rock folders that span 7 years. Using Screen-O-Matic meant starting over each time I thought of a change in sequence. My first attempt resulted in more than 10 minutes, and a 22mb file, too big for YouTube. My final cut was still too long, about 10mb, and impossible to view on a blog post with Verizon National Access relatively high speed internet service. The first three minutes play without interuption, but the rest of it filled the buffer with less than 30 seconds to view at a time.
I did not write a storyboard or a script. I told the story as I do it on tour. You don't do it with notecards. My audio voice-over took several tries, as that was the most time consumming element in the movie. I used some creative writing techniques to shorten the talk. Give credit again to Publication Coach Daphne Gray-Grant, whose newsletter I get by email each week. Here's a link to her website.
http://www.publicationcoach.com/index.php
2 comments:
Thanks for sharing your screencast of Split Rock lighthouse with us. What do you think of this tool and what might be done with it? You did a really nice job with this.
I'm going to sign off on Thing 38 with a further entry on this blog post.
Screen-O-Matic is the easiest of the free tools to use. I would prefer to have embedded the tutorial rather than send you off with a link.
As with many of my favorite Things, this skill demands practice, else easily forgotten.
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